Impossible.
I was nailed, rooted to the spot.
It seemed to me that the marble of the pavement had risen to my knees.
I was forced to remain until the end.
My feet were like ice, my head was on fire.
At last you took pity on me, you ceased to sing, you disappeared.
The reflection of the dazzling vision, the reverberation of the enchanting music disappeared by degrees from my eyes and my ears.
Then I fell back into the embrasure of the window, more rigid, more feeble than a statue torn from its base.
The vesper bell roused me.
I drew myself up; I fled; but alas! something within me had fallen never to rise again, something had come upon me from which I could not flee.”
He made another pause and went on,—
“Yes, dating from that day, there was within me a man whom I did not know.
I tried to make use of all my remedies. The cloister, the altar, work, books,—follies!
Oh, how hollow does science sound when one in despair dashes against it a head full of passions!
Do you know, young girl, what I saw thenceforth between my book and me?
You, your shade, the image of the luminous apparition which had one day crossed the space before me.
But this image had no longer the same color; it was sombre, funereal, gloomy as the black circle which long pursues the vision of the imprudent man who has gazed intently at the sun.
“Unable to rid myself of it, since I heard your song humming ever in my head, beheld your feet dancing always on my breviary, felt even at night, in my dreams, your form in contact with my own, I desired to see you again, to touch you, to know who you were, to see whether I should really find you like the ideal image which I had retained of you, to shatter my dream, perchance, with reality.
At all events, I hoped that a new impression would efface the first, and the first had become insupportable.
I sought you.
I saw you once more.
Calamity!
When I had seen you twice, I wanted to see you a thousand times, I wanted to see you always.
Then—how stop myself on that slope of hell?—then I no longer belonged to myself.
The other end of the thread which the demon had attached to my wings he had fastened to his foot.
I became vagrant and wandering like yourself.
I waited for you under porches, I stood on the lookout for you at the street corners, I watched for you from the summit of my tower.
Every evening I returned to myself more charmed, more despairing, more bewitched, more lost!
“I had learned who you were; an Egyptian, Bohemian, gypsy, zingara. How could I doubt the magic?
Listen.
I hoped that a trial would free me from the charm.
A witch enchanted Bruno d’Ast; he had her burned, and was cured.
I knew it.
I wanted to try the remedy.
First I tried to have you forbidden the square in front of Notre-Dame, hoping to forget you if you returned no more.
You paid no heed to it.
You returned.
Then the idea of abducting you occurred to me.
One night I made the attempt.
There were two of us.
We already had you in our power, when that miserable officer came up.
He delivered you. Thus did he begin your unhappiness, mine, and his own.
Finally, no longer knowing what to do, and what was to become of me, I denounced you to the official.
“I thought that I should be cured like Bruno d’Ast.
I also had a confused idea that a trial would deliver you into my hands; that, as a prisoner I should hold you, I should have you; that there you could not escape from me; that you had already possessed me a sufficiently long time to give me the right to possess you in my turn.
When one does wrong, one must do it thoroughly.
‘Tis madness to halt midway in the monstrous!
The extreme of crime has its deliriums of joy.
A priest and a witch can mingle in delight upon the truss of straw in a dungeon!
“Accordingly, I denounced you.